You will respect me ;)

title shamelessly nicked from one of Merry’s blogposts, but I feel justified in using it 😆

So, another September, another Davies’ birthday party extravaganza with themed baking, custom made goody bags, copious staging decorations and an inappropriate for the purpose of being adult in charge of a child’s birthday party cleavage revealing top. Back in the Goddard Family Party Venue Hall for the fourth time (Halloween 2005, Wallace & Gromit 2006, Princesses 2006), some additional guests, some much missed guests, my Mum and Dad in the corner and more camera flashes going off at critical moments than would make a Hollywood star feel loved.

I think it was the first time we’ve hosted a party and not had house guests the night before, which was slightly weird actually, but probably meant we enjoyed it more due to not being tired from over indulgence and a late night the night before, and over excitement with room fulls of children from early in the morning. It also meant we got everything expertly completed, left the house ready for the onslaught and were at the hall by 11am (hope they don’t check the alarm setting records, we didn’t start paying til 1pm!) sticking literally 100s of posters onto the walls. I think we did a good job for the Halloween party decorations but actually this probably was the best we’d managed to decorate what is essentially a rather tatty, characterless space. We had the Tardis on the stage, the Dalek overseeing the food tables, a K9 (which we’d made that morning and the paint was barely dry on) pinned to the wall and I got to put Chris Ecclestone on the gate and Ady put John Barrowman in the ladies. Win:win :).

Scarlett had given Davies her birthday present to him of a sonic screwdriver early for the party so the children ran around the hall dressed as Rose and The Doctor while ‘Are you my Mummy’ and the Doctor Who theme tune blared out.

Katy and her Weeping Angel were the first arrivals, shortly followed by the Magical Mondays Massive (fresh from their public transport adventures which they were not keen to share with me on the basis I ‘wouldn’t understand’ :shock:) and a steady stream of other guest from around the country. I think everyone was true to form, we had Ros complete with (very generous 🙂 ) gift and cards for Davies and anniversary present for me and Ady, and face paints – Ros definitely worked harder at that party than me 😆 when she wasn’t sitting between my parents looking like their long lost daughter of course 😉 (thanks darling xxx), we had The Babs arriving late complete with classic The Babs anecdote explaining her lateness 😆 Oh and Julie without Chris. Infact there was a distinct lack of Chrises really (should that Chrisi?) given that it’s easily the most common name for fathers of Davies and Scarlett’s friends and relations with just Chris French flying the flag for Price’s, Goddard’s, Raine’s and French’s and therefore earning the title later in the evening of ‘The Only Chris Present’ :lol:.

We ate, I was hassled for party games (we played ‘Don’t Blink’ (musical statues by any other name), pin the tail on the K9 (which happened once I’d made a new tail to replace the mysteriously disappeared one), an over under pass the balloon down the line game and one of Bob’s (surely now infamous) party games which involved holding hands and crawling through each other’s legs. At that point due to a team of 12 winning and about 11 joint winners of pin the tail on the K9 (due to me foolishly afixed said K9 to the wall with staples, one of which was in precisely the point the tail needed to be, so all the participants over 6 won hands down while the little ones were far more in the spirit of ‘comedy pinning’) I ran out of party prizes anyway. A quick straw poll ascertained that it was those children most hassling me for party games who were most likely to strop upon not winning and all of them were interested in the games for the prizes rather than the taking part, coupled with neither of my own children playing any of the party games (why would they want their play directed by a shouty grown up in a tit-flashing top when they could run around pretending to be 5 Doctor Who’s, 3 Rose’s, a Martha and a Cyberman :lol:) meant I didn’t need to bother with my planned themed versions of Duck, duck, goose (Doctor, Doctor, Dalek), Stuck in the mud (‘save me Doctor’) or ‘match your partner’ (split into pairs and find the matching poster to your partners selection). And of course nothing will ever compare to the popcorn game of 2005! 😆

I managed a quiet ten minutes with Davies sitting opening his cards,

(thanks for the photo Liza :))

another quiet ten minutes painting a tardis and a dalek on Scarlett’s cheeks,

Which impressed one of Ros’ list enough to have their face done by me but didn’t ease her workload as much as I’d hoped 😆

The annual lined up against the wall shot was taken – it compares well to last years 🙂
2006

2007

I enjoyed it, but of course the main thing is that Davies enjoyed it. And enjoy it he did 🙂

and this lovely one of Em’s I can’t seem to manage to nick for my own flickrstream ;).

The usual group effort of tidying up was made even speedier by getting the children involved with the promise of taking home to keep any posters they wanted to take off the wall. We waved off about the half the guests and the rest came back to ours. Alison, Lije and Lulah joined us for a couple of hours before heading off and leaving just the 24 of us sleeping here the night to organise fish and chips. Babs was selected for her natural organisational and making things simple skills (oh and the fact she wasn’t sure what fishcakes might be called in a southern seafood emporium) along with Bob (sober so could drive) and we somehow all squished in and managed to pass round salt and vinegar (when Scarlett wasn’t necking the vinegar direct from the bottle – funniest quote of the weekend was Davies rolling his eyes and saying ‘oh Scarlett, she’ll drink anything that looks like wine!’).

During the course of the evening the numbers in the lounge dwindled, the wine levels left in glasses got lower, a stack of books various adults had read aloud to various children grew higher and eventually at around 230 the remaining few went to bed. I have a new favourite baby girl :).

This morning started way too early. Scarlett roused, went downstairs to find Ady and couldn’t so came back upstairs again and got into bed with me. I assumed he’d woken early and whizzed off to a car boot sale so went back to sleep with the children, with Scarlett tsking about the children in Davies’ room next door saying ‘those kids are very noisy!’ (in fairness I think there were 7 of them :lol:) until we started to smell the unmistakable aroma of cat poo so got up and dressed in order to track down it’s location. We came downstairs to find a kitchenful of people and Ady brandishing the Ady machine. He’d gone out to let the cat out around 6am, managed to get locked out and felt it was too early to ring the bell to get someone to let him back in (fool, I’d have been hanging off the doorbell, rattling the letterbox, ringing everyone’s mobiles and throwing stones at the windows. Then again I’d have probably managed to get locked out whilst naked or without contact lense or something so I might have been more desperate to regain entry :lol:). Unfortunately the cat had somehow re-entered the house and shat copiously on the carpet in the hall, treating everyone to a scent rather different from the freshly brewed coffee and nicely warmly croissants we might have hoped to offer guests :(.

We remedied that with coffee and croissants and tea and brioche (thanks Family Fish for all the morning goods, oh and the organic milk ;)), the children burnt themselves out again running around in the garden while the rest of us slowly came to, ate, chatted, read aloud some more (I’m surprised I’ve not composed this blogpost in Seuss-esque couplets, I’ve read that many this last 24 hours :)) and slowly started to trickle away (aside from The Barts who were off at the crack of dawn to listen to loud fast cars 🙂 ) until eventually just The Only Chris Present, Helen and bean offspring were left.

Davies and I wandered to the butcher when we realised we’d not taken any lumps of dead animal out of our freezer for dinner tonight. The butcher was closed so we walked on into Lancing which was nice. He needed some fresh air, exercise, a bit of one to one and a bit of time away from the craziness, then Ady came and picked us up. The Beans left a short while afterwards and we finished making the house back into a home rather than a youth hostel :lol:.

We gave the children some of the leftover fizzy drinks and sweets from goody bags to try and keep them awake as they both wanted to go to bed at about 4pm. It had rather too much of the desired effect in Scarlett who was utterly wired throughout dinner and the repeat of X Factor before crashing and burning at 8pm. Davies wasn’t far behind and I kind of assume they won’t be waking any time too early tomorrow morning either.

It was a great weekend – thank you so much to everyone who came, contributed, supported, attended etc. It was very appreciated by all of us and I’m sure there’ll be another round of thank yous to come when Davies opens presents from people on his birthday on Friday.

I feel pretty much like I did 8 years ago right now; at the end of a crazy few days with lots of great memories and photos to remind of a lovely day. 🙂